Nowadays, with the development of services such as Internet and mobile broadband services, operators need to constantly purchase new devices to expand system capacity and enhance processing capabilities. However, the area, power supply, and heat dissipation capabilities of an equipment room are limited. With a continuous increase of devices, total power consumption of the devices keeps increasing, causing a serious limitation on device density and space utilization in the equipment room. Generally, power consumption of a communications device varies dynamically according to a load: When the load increases and a processor utilization rate rises, device power consumption increases; and when the load decreases and the processor is relatively idle, the device power consumption decreases. At present, two types of power consumption are generally set for a communications device: maximum power consumption and typical power consumption. The maximum power consumption is power consumed by a device when the load is the heaviest and/or the ambient temperature reaches an upper limit, and the typical power consumption is power consumed by the device under a typical load and a rated temperature.
In a practical operation process, multiple devices usually form a device group, and a certain power budget is allocated to the device group; in addition, a circuit breaker is used to provide overcurrent protection, and the number of devices that can be supported is calculated according to power consumption of each device in the device group. Under such circumstances, the power consumption of each device is generally calculated according to the maximum power consumption. For example, if the maximum power consumption of each device is 300 watts (W) and the typical power consumption thereof is 200 W, a 3000 W budget supports only 10 devices. However, the maximum power is seldom reached. Therefore, the foregoing configuration mode supports only a small number of devices and leads to a waste of precious equipment room space. In addition, the power supply system that supplies power to a rack is lightly loaded, which leads to a relatively low efficiency. If the configuration is based on the typical power consumption, 15 devices are supported, which improves space utilization of the rack; however, if the load of a device rises abruptly or the ambient temperature rises as a result of a fault in an air conditioner in the equipment room, power consumption of the device may approach the maximum value and overcurrent protection of the circuit breaker may be triggered, which leads to power-off of all communications devices and affects normal service processing.
For such problems, a power consumption limiting technology is put forward in the prior art: The power budget of each group of devices is allocated to each device in the group, the power allocated to each device is used as a power ceiling value of the device, and a baseboard management controller (BMC) of the device detects current device power consumption in real time; after detecting that power consumption of a device exceeds the ceiling value of the device, the BMC reduces a dominant frequency or a core voltage of a processor in the device, shuts down a functional module, or takes other measures, so as to reduce the power consumption of the device to less than the ceiling value, which ensures that total power consumption of all devices is lower than the power budget, avoids overcurrent protection of the circuit breaker, and reduces adverse effects on device performance; and after service processing is completed and the power consumption is reduced to a certain extent, the limiting operation stops, and the initial performance of the processor is restored.
With the power consumption limiting technology, a power consumption detection and a limiting operation of each device are independent from each other, and the management is relatively simple; however, if power consumption of a device exceeds the power consumption ceiling value while other devices are far from reaching their ceiling values, power consumption of the entire device group does not reach the budget value, which leads to relatively low utilization of resources. In addition, a ceiling value of each device must be set as accurately as possible. A relatively high ceiling value leads to a waste of resources, and a relatively low ceiling value leads to frequent limiting, affecting performance of the device.